Download Nouns Verbs

Another thing all approaches to syntax have
in common: Categories (& subcategories)
Morphology/Syntax
Categories
Categories are ‘parts of speech’
• Noun:
• So-called parts of speech are, e.g.,
Nouns
– Person, place, or thing
Prepositions
Conjunctions
Adjectives
Adverbs
Verbs
• Verb:
etc.
• “Parts of speech” refers to different types of
words, which behave in different ways in
sentences, phrases, and word-combinations.
The [N boy] likes basketball.
#The [N rock] likes basketball.
Classic definitions of P.O.S
*The [N swim] likes basketball.
*The [N red] likes basketball.
– Action, occurrence or state of being
• Adjective:
– Modifier that expresses quality, quantity or extent.
• Adverbs:
– Modifier that expresses manner, quality, place, time,
degree, number, cause, opposition, affirmation or denial
• Prepositions:
– Modifier that indicates location or origin.
‘Parts of speech’ are also called lexical categories or syntactic categories.
Problems with classic definitions
• The main problem with definitions like these is
that they are based on semantic criteria.
The theft of our property caused us to
question the honesty of our neighbors.
A theft is not a person,
place, or thing. It’s an action.
By semantic criteria, this
word should be a verb. But
it’s not – ‘theft’ is a noun.
Honesty is an
attribute, a property
normally associated
with adjectives. Yet
here it’s a noun.
Evidence against semantic definitions
(#1)
• Many words can change their part of speech
depending upon where they appear in a
sentence.
Gabrielle’s mother is a pilot. N
Stanley’s girlfriend likes to mother him. V
Olaf’s mother language is Norwegian. Adj
If a word’s syntactic category were determined by
its meaning, we would not expect this to happen.
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Evidence against semantic definitions
(#2)
Evidence against semantic definitions
(#3)
• Words that mean the same thing can have different
syntactic categories in different languages.
• Some parts of speech don’t lend themselves to
semantic definitions at all.
Warlpiri (Pama–Nyungan,
Northwest Australia):
Wita-ngku ka maliki wajilipinyi
small-SUBJ AUX dog chase.PRES
“The small (one) is chasing the dog.”
– Some words don’t seem to have meaning at all.
• Romeo say that he wanted to see Juliet.
– Other words’ meanings are determined by the
context in which they appear.
• Hillary sat by Carlos at the party.
• You should be at the airport by 10am.
• These plays were written by Shakespeare
Here, the word ‘wita’ (“small”) functions like a noun (e.g.,
taking subject marking). Is this a noun or an adjective?
If parts of speech were based on the meaning of the
word, how could we assign a part of speech to word
for which the meaning isn’t clear?
Evidence against semantic definitions
(#4)
Conclusion...
• The most striking evidence semantic
definitions for parts of speech are inadequate is
that we can know the part of speech of a word
without even knowing what it means:
The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically.
Adv
Adj
N
V
If parts of speech were based on the meaning of the
word, how could we know the part of speech of
word whose meaning we don’t know?
Distributional criteria
• There are two kinds of distributional tests for
determining part of speech:
– Morphological distribution
– Syntactic distribution
• Morphological distribution refers to the kinds
of affixes (prefixes, suffixes, etc.) that can
appear on a word.
• Syntactic distribution refers where a word can
appear in relation to other words.
• The criteria we use to determine
part of speech are not based on I.e., P.O.S. is not
determined
the meanings of the word.
semantically.
• Rather, we a word’s part of
I.e., P.O.S. is
speech determined by its
distributional behavior, i.e., by determined
where the word can appear in a syntactically &
sentence and in relation to other morphologically .
words and morphemes.
Because different languages have different word-orders and
different morphemes, the criteria for determining P.O.S. will be
language specific, i.e., they will be different for each language.
(English) Nouns
Morphological distribution
• Can be inflected for case,
number and gender
– I / me; he/him; we/us, etc.
– Dog/dogs; cat/cats;
child/children, etc.
– Waiter/waitress; host/hostess;
actor/actress, etc.
• Can appear with
derivational suffixes -ness, -ment, -ism, -er, etc.
Syntactic distribution
• Can appear after determiners
– [ the _____ ]; [ every _____ ]
• Can be the subject/object of
sentence
– [ ____ is in front of ____ ]
•
Can be modified by
Adjectives
– [ a large ____ ]
• Are negated by no (as opposed
to not or un-)
– No apples were eaten.
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(English) Verbs
Some preliminaries: Classes of verbs
• Pedagogical grammars often
distinguish main verbs from
‘helping verbs’
– John has been eating shrimp
– John may eat some shrimp.
– John did not eat shrimp.
• The technical term for a helping
verb is an auxiliary.
Verb
Aux
+Aux
Mod
– Modal auxiliaries: will, should, can...
Aspect
– Non-modal auxiliaries:
+Mod
Support
• Aspectual auxiliaries : have, be
• Support auxiliaries : do
Adjectives & adverbs
• Adjectives
– take comparative and superlative inflectional suffixes
• soft, softer, softest
–
–
–
–
take derivational affixes like -ish, -some and -esque
appear between ‘the’ & noun [ the _____ book ]
can follow ‘very’ [very ______ ]
can appear in copula constructions [John is _______ ]
• Adverbs
–
–
–
–
take -ly affix
appear before adjectives and verbs
[very _____ ]
can appear at very beginning or end of sentence
Morphological & syntactic
distribution of verbs
Aux verbs
+Aux verbs
• Take derivational affixes
like -ify, -ize, re-, un- , etc.
• Appear after auxiliaries
• Cannot invert to form
questions (*Swim you?)
• Do not take derivational
suffixes.
• Can invert to form
questions (Has Bill
arrived? Can you swim?)
Modal verbs:
• Take -s, -ed, -en, -ing,
inflectional affixes (can be
inflected for tense, mood,
aspect)
• Can appear as infinitives
(to swim, to have, to be)
+Modal verbs:
• Take no inflection
(*shoulded, *wills)
• Have no infinitive form
(*to should, *to can)
WARNING: Many suffixes in English
are homophonous
bakes
steals
bites
weaker
whiter
sweeter
eaten
written
taken
inflectional suffix
marking 3rd person
singular present
tense
inflectional
suffix
marking
plurality
inflectional suffix
marking adjective
as comparative
derivational
suffix: “one
who Vs”
inflectional suffix
marking verb as
past participle
derivational
suffix: “to make
more Adj”
cakes
wheels
nights
speaker
writer
heater
tighten
soften
weaken
Be careful when using affixes for morphological distribution tests.
Adjectives & adverbs: one category
• In contemporary linguistics, Adjectives and
Adverbs are seen as belonging to the same
syntactic category (usually abbreviated ‘A’).
• The reason: adjectives and adverbs are in
complementary distribution, and when linguistic
elements appear in complementary distribution,
this is strong evidence that they are positional
variants of one another.
• Adjectives (like quick) appear in one environment
(inside Noun Phrases), Adverbs (like quickly)
appear (only) elsewhere.
Complementary distribution in linguistics is the relationship between two
different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment
and the other element is found in the opposite environment.
Are N, V, A and P primitive categories?
• The categories can be characterized as follows
in terms of the features [±N] (substantive) and
[±V] (predicative):
• This notation
allows crosscategorical
reference to sets
of categories.
[±N]
[±V]
(substantive) (predicative)
N
V
A
+
–
+
–
+
+
P
–
–
E.g., the two categories that can appear with an NP complement in English – Verbs
and Prepositions – can now be referred to with the single feature: [–N].
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Open vs. closed classes
Lexical vs. functional categories
• Some parts of speech allow neologisms (= new
words).
• Some parts of speech don’t allow neologisms.
• Categories that allow new members are said to
be open categories. Those that don’t (or where
coinages are very rare) are closed categories.
• N, V, and A constitute the open categories.
• Lexical parts of speech provide the “content” of
the sentence. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and
adverbs are all lexical parts of speech.
• Functional parts of speech by contrast provide the
grammatical information or link parts of a
sentence together.
• Functional categories include Determiners,
Prepositions, Complementizers, Conjunctions,
Negation, Auxiliaries and Modals.
• The lexical/functional distinction is similar to (but
not identical to) the open/closed distinction.
Some Functional (Closed) Categories
of English
Some Functional (Closed) Categories
of English
• Prepositions (abbreviated P) appear before
nouns (or more precisely noun phrases).
• Prepositions of English: to, from, under, over,
with, by, at, above, before, after, through, near,
on, off, for, in, into, of, during, across, without,
since, until.
• Determiners (D) of English:
a) Articles: the, a, an
b) Deictic articles: this, that, these, those
c) Quantifiers: every, some, many, most, few, all,
each, any, less, fewer, no
d) (Cardinal) numerals: one, two, three, four, etc.
e) Possessive pronouns: my, your, his, her, its, our,
their
f) Some wh-question words: which, whose
Some Functional (Closed) Categories
of English
Some Functional (Closed) Categories
of English
• Conjunctions (Conj) are words that connect two
or more phrases together on an equal level
• Conjunctions of English: and, or, nor, neither …
nor, either … or
• The class of complementizers (C) also connects
structures together, but they embed one clause
inside of another instead of keeping them on an
equal level.
• Complementizers of English: that, for, if, whether
• (For now!) we'll say the Tense category (T)
consists of auxiliaries, modals and the nonfinite
clause marker.*
• Tense categories of English (T):
laser
internet
FAX
disco
Robot
defriend
– Auxiliaries: have/has/had, am/is/are/was/were,
do/does
– Modals: will, would, shall, should, can, could
– Non-finite Tense marker: to
*In the older syntactic literature, the category T is sometimes called
Infl (inflection) or Aux (Auxiliary). We’ll use the more modern T.
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Some Functional (Closed) Categories
of English
• There is one special category containing only
one word: not, which we’ll call negation
(Neg).
• There are other categories that express
negation (e.g., the determiners no, any, and the
noun none). We’ll reserve the category Neg for
the word not, however.
(Partial) Typology of English morphemes
Morphemes
Bound
Free (root)
Affix
Derivational
Prefix
Inflectional
Suffix
(Bound)
Closed class
Root
Open class
-ceive
the (D)
kiss (V)
and (Conj)
by (P)
whether (C)
can (T)
smile (V)
mad (A)
madly (A)
dog (N)
him (N)
honesty (N)
preuncon-
-ly
-ist
-ment
-ing
-en
-er
-ject
-fer
-mit
-gruntle
anti-
-able
-s
-mantle
A Closed Lexical Subclass
• You may have noticed that the open class and
lexical class correspond to exactly the same
categories;
• Similarly all of the cases of functional categories
we’ve mentioned are pretty clearly closed class
items.
• But... there are two cases where we have a
mismatch between the terms: Pronouns and
Anaphors.
• These are lexical (they are a subtype of N), but
they are closed classes.
Subcategories and features
• Recall:
– six different kinds of D (articles, deictics,
quantifiers, numerals, possessive pronouns, whwords), and
– three kinds of T (auxiliaries, modals, and the nonfinite marker).
• The technical term for these subtypes is
subcategories.
NB: ‘Bound root’ morphemes often appear in English textbooks,
but, according to definition, they are not truly morphemes.
Subcategories and features
• One way to mark subcategories is through the
use of features.
• Consider the case of pronouns. To distinguish
among the subcategories we can appeal to the
features person, number and gender and case:
he
her
you
Person
3
3
2
Number
sg.
sg.
--
we
1
pl.
Gender
Case
masc.
nom.
fem.
obl.
-nom./obl.
--
Subcategories of Nouns:
±plural
• English nouns can be either singular or plural.
• Singular nouns in English require a D; plural
ones do not require a D, although they allow
one:
– *Cat ate the spider
– The cat ate the spider
– Cats ate the spider
– The cats ate the spider
nom.
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Subcategories of Nouns:
±count
• English nouns can be either count nouns or
mass nouns.
• Count nouns represent individual, ‘countable’
elements: thing, person, moment, city
• “Mass nouns” usually can’t be counted in the
same way: sincerity, air, salt, amnesia
Mass nouns
take the
quantifier
much.
much air
*many air
many things
*much things
Count nouns
take the
quantifier
many.
Subcategories of Nouns:
±pronoun , ±anaphor
Subcategories of Nouns:
±common
• English nouns can be either proper names or
common nouns.
• For the most part proper names resist taking
determiners
– Jason
– *the Jason
• There are some exceptions to this generalization.
– the Smiths
– Spanish: La Rosamaria “the Rosemary”
Subcategories of Verbs
• Pronouns and anaphors differ from the other Ns in that
they are closed. They never allow determiners or
adjectival modification.
*the he
he
*the himself
himself
*big he
*big himself
• Pronouns belong to the class [+pronoun, –anaphor].
• Anaphors are [–pronoun, +anaphor].
• All other nouns are [–pronoun, –anaphor].
• Two major ways in which we can divide up verbs
into subcategories.
Subcategories of Verbs
Argument structure
• Some basic terms:
– A predicate defines the relation between the
individuals being talked about and the real world – as
well as with each other.
– The entities (which can be abstract) participating in the
relation are called arguments.
• Consider: Gwen hit the baseball.
– Two arguments in this example: Gwen and the
baseball. These are elements in the world that are
participants in the action described by the sentence.
– The predicate here is hit. It expresses a relation
between the two arguments.
– Along the lines of tense/finiteness (i.e., whether the
verb is left, leaves, (will) leave or (to) leave.
We'll return to this later!
– In terms of the number of Noun Phrases (NPs) and
Prepositional Phrases (PPs) or clauses (CPs) they
require.
• This second kind of division is known as
argument structure.
• A particular predicate’s argument structure
refers to the number of arguments that a
particular predicate requires. Another name for
argument structure is valency.
Transitivity
Intransitive
Transitive
Ditransitive
Valency
1 argument
2 arguments
3 arguments
Example
smile, arrive
hit, love, kiss
give, put
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Subcategories of Verbs
• Predicates also place restrictions on the categories
of the things that go with them.
• A verb like ask can take either an NP or a clause
(embedded sentence = CP) as a complement:
– I asked [NP the question].
– I asked [CP if you knew the answer].
• But a verb like hit can only take an NP
complement:
– I hit [NP the ball].
– *I hit [CP that you knew the answer].
Subcategories of Verbs:
transitives
• Intransitives verbs require a single NP subject
and nothing more.
– John smiled
– *John smiled Mary.
• We’ll mark this with the feature [NP _ ],
where the underscore represents where the
verb would go in the sentence.
• We can set up a series of features based on how
many and what kind of arguments a verb takes.
Subcategories of Verbs:
transitives
• Most transitive verbs require an NP object. We
can mark these with the feature [NP_NP].
– An example of this is the verb hit.
• Verbs like ask, think, say, etc. allow either an NP
object or a CP (embedded clause) object.
– Bill says dirty words.
– Mary says that Philip left yesterday.
• We can mark this using curly brackets { } and a
slash. {NP/CP} means “a choice of NP or CP.” So
the feature structure for predicates like this is
[NP_{NP/CP}]
Subcategories of Verbs:
ditransitives (2)
• The opposite kind of ditransitive is found with
the verb put. Put requires an NP and a PP:
– *I put [NP the box] [NP the book].
– I put [NP the book] [PP in the box].
• This kind of ditransitive takes the feature:
[NP _ NP PP]
Subcategories of Verbs:
ditransitives (1)
• Ditransitive verbs come of several major types.
• Some ditransitives require two NP objects (the
first is an indirect object the other a direct object.)
– The verb spare is of this category. It does not allow an
NP and a PP:
• I spared [NP him] [NP the trouble].
• *I spared [NP the trouble] [PP to him].
• This category of ditransitive is marked with the
feature: [NP_NP NP]
Subcategories of Verbs:
ditransitives (3)
• We also have ditransitives that appear to be a
combination of these two types and allow
either an NP or a PP in the second position:
– I gave [NP the box] [PP to Leah].
– I gave [NP Leah] [NP the box].
• These have the feature [NP _ NP {NP/PP}]
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Subcategories of Verbs:
ditransitives (4)
• Finally we have ditranstives that take either
two NPs, or one NP and one CP, or an NP and
a PP:
– I told [NP Daniel] [NP the story].
– I told [NP Daniel] [CP that the exam was cancelled].
– I told [NP the story] [PP to Daniel].
• Verbs like tell have the feature :
[NP _ NP {NP/PP/CP}]
Subcategories of Verbs
• The following chart summarizes all the different subcategories
of verb we’ve discussed:
Subcategory
V [NP_ ] (intransitive)
Example
leave
V[NP _ NP] (transitive type 1)
V[NP _{NP/CP}] (transitive type 2)
V[NP _ NP NP] (ditransitive type 1)
V[NP _ NP PP] (ditransitive type 2)
V[NP _ NP {NP/PP}] (ditransitive type 3)
hit
ask
spare
put
give
V[NP _ NP {NP/PP/CP}] (ditransitive type 4)
tell
See you next time,
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